tion gradually grew up, the distinction being
marked by participation in separate sacrificial feasts. The cause
which ultimately broke down the religious distinctions of the Roman
and Greek states was the development of a feeling of nationality. In
the common struggle for the preservation of the city the prejudices
of the patricians weakened, and after a long internal conflict, the
plebeians were admitted to full rights of citizenship. The plebeians
were employed as infantry in the Roman armies, while the patricians
rode, and the increased importance of infantry in war was one great
cause of the improvement in the position of the plebeians. [234] In
India, in the absence of any national feeling, and with the growth of
a large and powerful priestly order, religious barriers and prejudices
became accentuated rather than weakened. The class distinctions grew
more rigid, and gradually, as the original racial line of cleavage was
fused by intermarriage and the production of groups of varying status,
these came to arrange themselves on a basis of occupation. This is
the inevitable and necessary rule in all societies whose activities
and mode of life are at all complicated. Racial distinctions cannot
be preserved unless in the most exceptional cases, where they are
accentuated by the difference of colour, and such a moral and social
gulf as that which exists between the whites and negroes in North
America. In primitive society there is no such mental cleavage to
render the idea of fusion abhorrent to the superior race; the bar is
religious, and while it places the inferior race in a despised and
abject position, there is no prohibition of illicit unions nor any
such moral feeling or principle as would tend to restrict them. The
ideas of the responsibilities and duties of parentage in connection
with heredity, or the science of eugenics, are entirely modern, and
have no place at all in ancient society. As racial and religious
distinctions fade away, and social progress takes place, a fresh
set of divisions by wealth and occupation grows up. But though this
happened also in the Greek and Italian cities, the old religious
divisions were not transferred to the new occupational groups, but
fell slowly into abeyance, and the latter assumed the simply social
character which they have in modern communities. The main reason
for the obliteration of religious barriers, as already stated, was
the growth of the idea of nationality and the p